4 ms·

After we've achieved all these things, we can start asking when "general intelligence" will arrive.

by Buttons840 10y ago

rogaha 10y ago
Do you mean self consciousness machines?
- KellhusSmellhus 10y ago
  AGI is a pretty hard to define term, but I never saw it defined as "self-conscious". Most definitions are along the lines of "do what a human does", i.e. walk into a random house and make coffee or get a college degree, or, more mathematically, "Average a good score over all possible problems, weighted by their likelyhood and the compactness of your code"
nnq 10y ago
Most humans are pretty bad at at least a few of those things. Also, some are tasks that the human brain is specifically optimized for - human natural language most likely plays well to lots of human-hardware-design-quircks. So using them a test sounds pretty bad / unfair - lots of human-level but independently evolved alien intelligences would probably fail miserably at them. You could have above-human intelligence barely reaching human performance at either of these tasks but vastly surpassing human intelligence at others... Imho GI "will arrive" after the point that we have swarms of similar close-to-human-level ai-agents trying to model each other's behavior while competing and collaborating in artificial and natural environments. All theories of self-consciousness that make some sense imho are about agents trying to model self-similar agents and then somewhow reframing this ability to model past and future self. So you could have self-conscious dog-level agents (yeah, I believe "self conscience" is quantitative and a dog can have some of it and a human a different level of it, not 0 or 1), or non-self conscious above-human-"general"-AIs (though I don't know if you'd want to label "general" any non-self conscious AI, and I think any non-self-conscious above-human AI would get "self conscience" quite fast if you were to push it be be "general purpose" - striving to solve more and more types of problems, you inevitably arrive to some formulation of the "model something like yourself in order to predict its actions" problem).
- hacker_9 10y ago
  Hardware plays a massive part too; I don't see a static micro processor becoming conscious anytime soon. Our brains though are literally physical neural networks, that grow, move, and change physically all the time.
  - nnq 10y ago
    It does not. Any kind of software can run on any kind of turing complete hardware. Unless you're one of those believing in the quantum mind theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind . Just as a human brain can simulate a microprocessor (although unusably slow and with errors), so can a microprocessor simulate a human brain (also unusable slow). Read a bit more on turing equivalence - a badly explained topic unfortunately, because you know how bad are mathematicians at explaining stuff, even if imho it should be part of junior school curricula in a simplified version. (Oh, and maybe it's brushed off because it can also lead to pretty trippy conclusions: take a cockroach brain which is likely turing complete, mount it as a cpu in some kind of computer, stuck in a maigc time-machine box that makes time run order of magnitude faster, add some really fancy input/output tech, and you could run a human mind on it... think of what the reincarnation weirdoes would milk from this :) ) I'm pretty sure that if you find a way to extract a mathematical model of a human's personality, and a way to transform it to reduce "chemical noise quircks" and other hardware dependent but unnecessary "features"/bugs, you could run it just fine on a big datacenter and have a working immortal human mind. (I'm also pessimistic enough to believe that we'll solve the "general AI" problem before solving the "mind extraction" one unfortunately. Hopefully our creations don't destroy us completely before solving problem (2) and we have time to pass on some direct immortal legacy of what it means to be "human"...) P.S. but yeah, I agree that engineering better suited hardware might be actually easier than getting the current type of hardware fast enough or than inventing the mathematical transforms needed to run a mind's set of equations on current type hardware... we're slowly getting to custom hardware for ai ( https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha... ), but I imagine the future will be more analog/clockless...
daveguy 10y ago
I think several of these will be post general intelligence. Especially the one(s) that require a simple explanation of reasoning, the generalized learning from an example or two and contextual understanding of natural language.

After we've achieved all these things, we can start asking when "general intelligence" will arrive.

rogaha 10y ago

Do you mean self consciousness machines?

KellhusSmellhus 10y ago
AGI is a pretty hard to define term, but I never saw it defined as "self-conscious". Most definitions are along the lines of "do what a human does", i.e. walk into a random house and make coffee or get a college degree, or, more mathematically, "Average a good score over all possible problems, weighted by their likelyhood and the compactness of your code"

nnq 10y ago

Most humans are pretty bad at at least a few of those things. Also, some are tasks that the human brain is specifically optimized for - human natural language most likely plays well to lots of human-hardware-design-quircks. So using them a test sounds pretty bad / unfair - lots of human-level but independently evolved alien intelligences would probably fail miserably at them. You could have above-human intelligence barely reaching human performance at either of these tasks but vastly surpassing human intelligence at others... Imho GI "will arrive" after the point that we have swarms of similar close-to-human-level ai-agents trying to model each other's behavior while competing and collaborating in artificial and natural environments. All theories of self-consciousness that make some sense imho are about agents trying to model self-similar agents and then somewhow reframing this ability to model past and future self. So you could have self-conscious dog-level agents (yeah, I believe "self conscience" is quantitative and a dog can have some of it and a human a different level of it, not 0 or 1), or non-self conscious above-human-"general"-AIs (though I don't know if you'd want to label "general" any non-self conscious AI, and I think any non-self-conscious above-human AI would get "self conscience" quite fast if you were to push it be be "general purpose" - striving to solve more and more types of problems, you inevitably arrive to some formulation of the "model something like yourself in order to predict its actions" problem).

hacker_9 10y ago
Hardware plays a massive part too; I don't see a static micro processor becoming conscious anytime soon. Our brains though are literally physical neural networks, that grow, move, and change physically all the time.
- nnq 10y ago
  It does not. Any kind of software can run on any kind of turing complete hardware. Unless you're one of those believing in the quantum mind theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind . Just as a human brain can simulate a microprocessor (although unusably slow and with errors), so can a microprocessor simulate a human brain (also unusable slow). Read a bit more on turing equivalence - a badly explained topic unfortunately, because you know how bad are mathematicians at explaining stuff, even if imho it should be part of junior school curricula in a simplified version. (Oh, and maybe it's brushed off because it can also lead to pretty trippy conclusions: take a cockroach brain which is likely turing complete, mount it as a cpu in some kind of computer, stuck in a maigc time-machine box that makes time run order of magnitude faster, add some really fancy input/output tech, and you could run a human mind on it... think of what the reincarnation weirdoes would milk from this :) ) I'm pretty sure that if you find a way to extract a mathematical model of a human's personality, and a way to transform it to reduce "chemical noise quircks" and other hardware dependent but unnecessary "features"/bugs, you could run it just fine on a big datacenter and have a working immortal human mind. (I'm also pessimistic enough to believe that we'll solve the "general AI" problem before solving the "mind extraction" one unfortunately. Hopefully our creations don't destroy us completely before solving problem (2) and we have time to pass on some direct immortal legacy of what it means to be "human"...) P.S. but yeah, I agree that engineering better suited hardware might be actually easier than getting the current type of hardware fast enough or than inventing the mathematical transforms needed to run a mind's set of equations on current type hardware... we're slowly getting to custom hardware for ai ( https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha... ), but I imagine the future will be more analog/clockless...

daveguy 10y ago

I think several of these will be post general intelligence. Especially the one(s) that require a simple explanation of reasoning, the generalized learning from an example or two and contextual understanding of natural language.